Photo courtesy of Coffee Bluff Marina It was a big day for Cole, lefy, and Will Walker Saturday when fishing with their dad Capt. Jackson Walker. The Coffee Bluff trio caught over 20 trout, including one weighing 1 pound, 6 ounces and a flounder tipping the scales at 3 pounds,6 ounces, which the two youths are holding.

Photo courtesy of David Wood Jacqlyn Tsao, fishing with David Wood and John King, got the surprise of her life when she hooked and landed this black drum. "It can't be a real fish," was her comment when she realized the size.

Photo courtesy of Capt. Ray Golden A top-water first - Amy Golden shows a large spotted sea trout she landed this past week, her first using a top-water artificial lure. She and husband Capt. Ray Golden were targeting red drum when the trout took the lure.

Photo courtesy of David Wood It was a day looking for big fish for John King and Jacqlyn Tsao, who were fishing with David Wood this past weekend. King was the first to get a strike, landing and releasing this multi-spotted red drum.

Last week there was a lot of talk about tripletail action. This week the chatter is about spotted sea trout and reds, big and small.

The bite with both seems to be improving over a wide area of the coast. Black drum continue to show up on the catch list, as do Spanish mackerel, sharks, flounder and whiting.

Trout and redfish apparently are the most talked about, with fishing guides, marinas, fishing camps and bait suppliers taking note of the improved action.

Catch reports began to trickle in last week as the word spread the bite was improving, with a lot of the action reported around the edges of the sounds and along the beach fronts.

Top-water action

Capt. Ray Golden, who operates Coffee Bluff Marina and also keeps us abreast of the action in and around Ossabaw Sound, has been aggressively targeting trout and reds while using top-water artificial lures. The action he encountered last week is sure to draw attention to the method.

In an email sent Thursday, he told of chasing reds for the third day in a row. His wife, Amy, joined him the previous day and landed her first-ever trout using the top-water method.

“The reds were there,” he wrote, noting that, unlike the two previous days, the water was “extremely clear.”

The clarity made for a unique look at the reds.

“You could see them coming up, and they would smack the top-water plug with their noses, but would not engulf it,” he wrote. “I think they could see something they didn’t like.”

He added that they both had several reds nudge the plugs, but no takers.

Following with another email the next day, Capt. Ray made note of the hot redfish action earlier in the week that produced some “bruisers” 28 to 30 inches in length, saying a shift in the wind made fishing more difficult, but that didn’t keep the big trout from jumping on the big lure.

“This morning it was awesome!” he closed.

Good catch

On Saturday, he emailed again, this time about Coffee Bluff resident Capt. Jackson Walker and his sons Cole and Will getting into the trout and flounder. They returned with 20 trout, one of which tipped the scales at 1 pound, 6 ounces, and a flounder weighing 3 pounds, 6 ounces.

Apparently the flounder turned out to be a spunky battler, with both Cole and Will using the tag-team method to boat it.

The largest trout was caught on a finger mullet, the flounder on dead shrimp, as were the rest of the trout.

Big fish, surprise

Another of our weekly contributors, David Wood, gave us his update on last weekend’s action when he took John King and Jacqlyn Tsao looking for big reds and black drum, adding that they both wanted a taste of big fish action.

“The winds were a bit tough and the tides were running a little fast, so anchoring on the spot was a bit difficult,” he wrote.

Wood apparently had to make several anchoring attempts, saying they finally landed where he wanted to be.

“John struck first with a nice multi-spotted red on live bait. After a couple of minutes it was Jacqlyn with a monster black drum ...”

Noting that she fought the fish several minutes before it finally tired and was boated, Wood wrote that she was even more amazed at its size.

“This can’t be a real fish!” she said.

Wood added that they baited up again for another round and caught several more, none of which were close to the size of the one landed by Tsao.

He also said a school of Spanish mackerel provided some more enjoyment, with more hook-ups than fish landed.

The reports

A check with several locations this week shows a slowdown since the weekend, but still enough people are venturing out to indicate continued interest.

Adam’s Boat Shop at Thunderbolt, when contacted Tuesday, said the traffic had slowed since the weekend, but through Sunday there had been a lot of trout action reported, with a mix of both large and small fish indicated.

Kilkenny Marina in Bryan County gave a similar report. Danny Bacot said a tournament held over the weekend recorded several trout in the 2-pound range, and that there also was a mix of both keeper and yearling fish.

“It seems to be a mix of too big or too small,” said Raburn Goodman at Yellow Bluff, referring mostly to red drum.

The yearling schools are showing up over a large area of the coast and are still well short of the minimum keeper length.

“From what (the fishermen) are telling me, it looks like it will be about October before these fish reach keeper size,” he said.

Shellman Fish Camp, located at Shellman Bluff in McIntosh County and adjacent to Sapelo Sound, also reported mostly small fish activity. There were a lot of yearling trout and bass, giving optimism the fall fishing season will be good, but not a lot talk relative to current action and keeper-sized trout being landed.

For the second consecutive week, there has been little news relative to any offshore action, mostly due to wind conditions.

Of all the fishing camps, marinas and bait dealers contacted this week, none had any offshore action to report.

The live bait shrimp picture looks much the same as it did a week ago, with several of the bait shrimp fishermen saying they are still harvesting a mix of brown and white shrimp.

White shrimp are on the increase, with better concentrations of small shrimp being caught in many of the approved dragging areas.